1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates to a process for identifying the occurrence of alarm fatigue in a clinical setting, and generating and sending an alert message in response.
2. Background
Healthcare organizations place a high value on receiving and responding, in real-time or near real-time, to patient or non-patient related events. These events can be generated by any number of different devices that can be connected to a healthcare communication network, such as patient monitors, patient call devices, nurse call devices, operating room communication devices to name only a few. For example, an event can be generated as the result of the collection by a patient monitor of real-time physiological parametric information about patients. Such parametric information can include, among other things, a patient's heart rate or other heart function, blood pressure, blood oxygen level, and respiratory rate. This parametric information is typically detected by sensors, attached to a patient, and the sensors transmit the detected physiological information over a wired or wireless link to a patient monitoring device (either proximate to a patient or remote to the patient) which can in turn be in communication with a local network maintained by the healthcare organization. Subsequent to collecting patient parametric information, a monitor can analyze the information for the purpose of generating a message that includes information that causes and alarm to be generated and sent to one or more appropriate clinicians alerting them to a patient's condition or event, which can be for example a low heart rate or low blood pressure condition. In order for a monitor to determine whether or not an alarm should be generated, a threshold value associated with each physiological parameter can be set. For example, if it is clinically determined that an alarm should be generated when a patient's heart rate falls below eighty beats per minute, then the threshold value for recognizing a low heart rate can be set to eighty.
In a typical healthcare setting, one or more clinicians can be responsible for attending to multiple patients during a specified period of time (i.e., work shift). Depending upon the type of clinical unit (i.e., ER, ICU, etc.) in which a clinician is working, greater or fewer numbers of alerts can be generated and sent to them during their shift of work. In certain cases, if the number of alerts generated and sent to any one or more clinicians exceeds their ability to respond to the alerts with care for patients, and depending upon the type of alert they receive (ranging from critical type alerts to non-critical type alerts . . . i.e., respiratory arrest or need a bed pan), the clinician(s) may become desensitized to the alerts, and consciously or unconsciously ignore the alerts until they finish with a current task, if ever. This conscious or unconscious behavior to ignore alerts in the face of a large number of alerts is typically referred to as alarm fatigue, and alarm fatigue is a major cause of poor patient outcomes or mortality in clinical settings.
If one or more alerts are generated in response to clinical events that are not life threatening, such as a slightly elevated respiratory or heart rate for example, a workers behavior to temporarily or permanently ignore this type of alert will, in all probability not harm a patient. However, if as described above, due to receiving an overwhelming number of alerts during a shift (some of which can be critical and some of which may not be critical), the healthcare worker consciously or unconsciously ignores an alert that is generated as the result of a critical patient event, then the patient outcome may be at risk.